Why Freedom?
by Teityan1
Summary: For a House Elf, freedom isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.


The lunchtime rush in the kitchens of Hogwarts was drawing to a close. Today's lunch was easy – soup, sandwich materials, a variety of biscuits for dessert – and Rindy found herself done with delivery duty with time to spare. Already a number of the house elves on duty for this meal had left in search of other work to keep them occupied until it was time for cleanup, and she was ready to do the same.

Where should she begin? The common rooms, with a steady stream of students passing through and leaving disorder behind, were in constant need of cleaning. One of them would make a good start. Because one common room was much like another, and she had to begin somewhere, she flipped a mental four-sided coin, and it came up Gryffindor.

The room was empty of students, but another house elf, Borrel, was already making good headway on straightening the furniture and cleaning out the crumbs and other debris left behind by children who insisted on snacking without plates. Rindy threw him a cheerful "Hello!" and trotted off to tackle the fireplaces. Some of the others disliked cleaning up the ash from old fires because of how dirty it made them, but she actually enjoyed the authorized grubbiness. Besides, the fireplaces were an integral part of the castle, and as such the sense of contentment she received from them as they became cleaner was clearer than the gratitude from things less solidly connected to the structure, like furniture or even carpets.

The first fireplace was clean and set up with fresh logs, and she was nearly at the second fireplace when she noticed something colorful at the foot of the poker that leaned against the wall. "What's that?" she asked Borrel, who was plumping the throw pillows on the couch just across the way.

"What's what?" He looked in the direction that she was pointing.

"This." She picked up the bit of brightness, which turned out to be a piece of knitting. She slipped it onto her hand just in time to hear his reply.

"It looks like a sock. It's –" His eyes went wide, and his ears flattened with surprise. "Clothes! Hogwarts has given Rindy clothes!"

As he finished speaking, she felt a sudden disappearance, an emptiness where the sense of presence from the castle and its inhabitants should have been. "Borrel?" she wailed. "Borrel, Rindy is not feeling right. Rindy is feeling… not." She did not know how to express the hollow aloneness. It was unlike anything she had experienced before. All her life she had been a part of something larger, the entity that was Hogwarts and all of the beings who lived, studied and worked there. Now she felt isolated and almost unbearably small.

The male elf's face was suffused with wonder. "Rindy is free. She is not bound to Hogwarts any more. She can go wherever she pleases – do whatever she pleases. Borrel has heard of such a thing, but he has never seen it before."

"But Rindy does not want to be free! Not if it means losing her connection to Hogwarts. Not if it means being alone." She chucked the sock on top of the remains of the old logs and set it ablaze, scowling at it as it burned, until the last thread was consumed. Still the place where the link to her home used to be stayed empty.

On hands and knees she crawled to the fireplace and began cleaning out the ash. "Please, Hogwarts! Please take Rindy back. She is your elf, and you are her house. That is all she wants, not this _freedom._ " Her upper lip curled in a sneer, and her tone of voice turned the word into a curse. "Please take her back. Please. Please." No response came from the castle, not even when the fireplace was clean enough to eat in.

A tentative hand touched her shoulder, and she turned her head toward the hand's owner. "Rindy should not be so upset. She can still stay at Hogwarts – still live and work here with all of her friends." Borrel's ears drooped, and his eyes were unspeakably sad.

Tears streamed down Rindy's cheeks, and she moaned, "It would not be the same. Rindy is no longer a part of here. Of the elves of this house. She is different now. She does not know how she could stay, knowing what she has lost. What all the others still have." Yet how could she leave? Hogwarts was all she knew. It was her life. She did not know how to start a new one, out there on her own.

Borrel leaned forward until his forehead touched Rindy's, as if by connecting physically he hoped to join their awareness the way it used to be. "Borrel will always be here for Rindy. He is her friend, and he always will be, and he hopes she will stay at Hogwarts. She is different, but she is still Rindy, and this is still her home." He nodded, bumping foreheads, and then scrambled to his feet and returned to his cleaning.

Rindy sat for a moment, folded around too much pain to move. Then she dried her face on the ash-crusted dish towel that covered the front of her body, and rose slowly, as if too old and infirm to do more than sit by the fire and watch others work. _At least Rindy_ can _still clean,_ she thought as she shambled toward the next fireplace. Perhaps someday, if she did her very best and worked until her fingers blistered and her back ached, Hogwarts would forgive her for unwittingly accepting freedom and take her back as one of its own.


End file.
